Johnson: A rebuild by any other name is still a rebuild

George Johnson, Calgary Herald04.02.2013

Jay Bouwmeester will now suit up for the St. Louis Blues after being dealt Monday night.Jamie Sabau
/ NHLI via Getty Images

PLYMOUTH, MICHIGAN: APRIL 3, 2010 -- Windsor Spitfires Taylor Hall is congratulated by teammates Mark Cundari, left, and Adam Henrique during game 2 of the Ontario Hockey League Western Conference Final against the Plymouth Whalers in Plymouth, Michigan on April 3, 2010. (JASON KRYK/ THE WINDSOR STAR)Sports
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Yes, to confirm rumors, that was in fact Jay Feaster toting around a suspicious-looking box marked TNT with a downward-plunging handle and a long fuse as dusk began to gather in southern Alberta early Monday evening.

Hockey’s oldest team, for so long so stubborn about injecting youth into a geriatric lineup, is shedding years faster than contestants shedding pounds on a episode of The Biggest Loser.

The Calgary Flames are out there selling harder than a pushy door-to-door encyclopeodia peddler. Household names are being handed one-way tickets out of town. Picks and prospects are coming back.

The full-bore rebuild - not re-tool, not re-jig, not reconfigure - is on. In earnest. It’s happened too late, naturally. But it is happening now. For so long, the Flames were the equivalent of the hamster in the exercise wheel, running, running, running, day after blessed day, season after season, getting essentially nowhere.

Eventually, the hamster’s heart gives out and you need to go to the pet shop and buy a new hamster. Or you go a different direction.

The Iginla trade late last Wednesday signified a seismic shift in organizational philosophy. If the face of the franchise could be dealt, then the game was most definitely on; nothing above investigation.

Bouwmeester went were the rumors were always strongest, St. Louis. Blues’ boss Ken Hitchock, another noted northern Alberta son, is a vocal fan of his. And, to be fair, the ex-Florida Panther’s biggest problem here was always his pay stub - $6.7 million a season, or $33 mil over five.To rake in that manner of coin in a market like Calgary, you need to be a nightly difference-maker.

Jay Bouwmeester, put simply, wasn’t.

Through his three-plus years here, his advocates always considered him a dependable, better-than-given-credit-for defensive defenceman. No one questioned the invisible air tank strapped to his back. The man’s lung capacity allowed him to log 30 minutes without so much as a heavy sigh. He’d have made a great horn player in somebody’s band.

His detractors, though, saw nothing but an uber-soft D-man, kind of a human-form Mr. Bill, the plasticene whipping boy on old Saturday Night Live skits (“Ryan Kesler! Oh, nooooooooooooooooo!”).

This season, given more of a free reign to wander, to improvise offensively under the less stringent hand of Bob Hartley, he flourished and looked more like the player everyone so coveted when the Flames traded for his signing rights from the Panthers back in 2009.

Hence, outside interest as the Flames began sagging and the vultures started circling.

Boumeester, as doubtless everyone outside Katmandu is aware by now, has never played a playoff game. Well, he’s sick to the teeth of being reminded of the subject on garbage-bag day every April. When the Iginla shoe dropped, he realized the jig was up for another year. And he’s 29. The time had come for him, too, to leave.

Teetering on the edge of the sixth-seventh-eighth-ninth spots in the Western Conference, there’s no ironclad guarantee he’ll get there with the Blues this year, either. But regardless of how sporadic Hitchcock’s men have been, he still has a real good chance. Unlike Calgary. Where there is none.

Kiprusoff falls into that Boumeester/ambition category. Rumors were running rampant Monday that he’d given his agent permission to talk to the Toronto Maple Leafs. If this is to be his NHL swan song - speculation is rife that the silent Finn has no intention of returning to see out the final year of his deal - he’d dearly love to at least have one last shot at playoff glory. Maybe even summon up warm memories of that stirring run the improbably unheralded Flames had back in ‘04. Who could blame him?

For the quality of goaltender he is, he deserves at least that much, if it is his wish.

Yes, it has been a tumultuous week. Unparalleled, really, in this organization’s history. And you get the feeling Jay Feaster, that old used-car salesman, isn’t done spinning deals out of his lot yet.

That day of reckoning this organization had procrastinated over for quite some time has at last arrived. The insidious fear about unwavering fan support over the long haul will be put to the test (It’s one thing to pledge that you’ll back a full-blown restructure, another to actually live through it).

The season is now, officially, a concede. They’re waving the white flag. That hiding they absorbed up in Edmonton on Monday night? This is what rebuilding, as painful as it might seem, means.

So get used to it.

Oh, and get used to hearing the name Nathan MacKinnon. You’ll be hearing it a lot over the next little while.

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